What role do companies play, if people get what they need from each other?

The collaborative economy is on the rise. It’s the third phase of social: First came social media where the media landscape was democratised as people started sharing and creating media; then came social business where businesses started using social technologies across the enterprise; and thirdly came the collaborative economy which is about sharing and creating physical goods and services.

Ever since Ed and I launched Orca Social earlier this year we’ve been asked the same questions again and again. So I figure it makes sense to answer these questions in a FAQ style blog post (BTW: for some odd reason I love FAQs). Here it goes.

I never understood social media marketing. To my best understanding, social media has never been about marketing. It has always been about communication. In essence, what happened 10 years ago with Facebook, MySpace and other social networks was that companies got sidelined as part of the web became social.

“Two newlyweds spend their honeymoon in a rented loft instead of a chain hotel. A first-time mom rents a stranger’s truck in her neighborhood to pick up a baby crib. An entrepreneur taps the crowd to fund a new product on kickstarter rather than seek traditional investors.”

Ever since Jeremiah Owyang took the stage at LeWeb 2013 and presented his and Altimeter Group’s research and report on the collaborative economy I’ve been convinced: The collaborative economy will be one of the next big things. Jeremiah’s impressive keynote back then made clear that this is a new business model that will upset most industries in the years to come.

Earlier this week, we (Ed Major and I) launched a new company called Orca Social as we see a need for large B2B companies to make better use of social technologies. Visit the website here.

The key for B2B companies is to learn to do social from within. The alternative is grim: If they engage external resources it becomes costly, slow and inauthentic. And, even more important, they miss out on the chance to break the silos and nurture a culture on which you can scale the social efforts to include e.g. social selling, social media customer service, social listening, internal collaboration etc. Continue reading “Introducing Orca Social, a member-based social media consultancy”

We’re talking 20-25%. That’s the raise in knowledge worker’s productivity that McKinsey estimates can be obtained through internal usage of social collaboration tools. That number came out last summer through their social media report entitled The Social Economy, and the lead from the project, Michael Chui, was kind enough to join us in a Hangout to explain further.

More specifically, the point of McKinsey’s study is – and it’s based on an impressive and convincing amount of research – that office employees on average spend 28 hours a week or more than 60% of their time writing and reading emails, searching for information and attending meetings. Many of these things can be done more rapidly and efficiently through internal social platforms such as Chatter, Yammer and Jive.